Researching Keywords and Keyword Selection

The first step in the optimization process is keyword analysis.

The idea being to choose keywords that people are actually searching for, and at the same time, don’t have many websites that are already optimized for those keywords.

Fortunately you don’t have to guess as there are a number of keyword research tools that you can use that take data from actual web searches.

The most popular one being the Overture keyword suggestion tool.Because this tool is free I will use it here for illustration. The example we are going to examine is a fictitious computer consultant.

So if you go to the overture tool and enter the keywords computer consultant this is what you get.

From this list you can see that there are over 5000 searches for computer consultant which shows healthy demand. However if you go Google a search for “computer consultant” (using quotes) you see that there are nearly 1 million competing sites.

However if you look slightly down the list you will see that computer consultant services has over 700 searches and a check for the competition on Google shows:

Only 800 competing sites.

Computer consultant services is a much better choice than just computer consultant and it as a bonus it means that you are also targeting the term computer consultant as well.

If you look further down the list you will see that many searches are looking to find a consultant in their area.

This is typical for any type of local service and so if you are offering any type of local service you should also always ensure that you include the locations you serve on your site.

Now a web page can only be optimized for 2 to 3 keyword phrases and so we can choose another 2 phrases to optimize around these will become our secondary phrases.

We need to repeat the same process for these secondary phrases as we did for the primary so that we choose phrases that we stand a good chance of ranking well with.

The results are:

Keyword	demand	supply
“computer security consultant”	1335	33,800
“computer system consultant”	327	883
“business computer consultant”	335	10,500

In this case I would choose the terms computer system consultant and computer security consultant because it offers good demand but limited supply.